How to Grow the Fuck Up: A Guide to Humans

Evidence-Based

Learning how to grow up and be more mature starts with knowing what
you truly value. Being an adult means sticking to your values, even when
it's not popular or doesn't benefit you.
40 minute readPhilosophy

W hen I was like four years old, despite my mother warning me

not to, I put my finger on a hot stove. The stove was red and bright and shiny
and I knew yummy food came from it, so the allure was irresistible.
That day I learned an important lesson: really hot things suck. They burn you.
And you want to avoid touching them again.

Around the same time, I made another important discovery. The ice cream
that my parents would treat me on occasion was stored in the freezer, on a
shelf that could be easily accessed if I stood on my tippy toes.

One day, while my mother was in the other room (poor mom), I grabbed the
ice cream, sat on the floor, and proceeded to engorge myself with my bare
hands.

It was the closest I would come to an orgasm for another ten years. If there
was a heaven in my little four-year-old mind, I had just found it. Fucking
perfection. My own little bucket of Elysium filled with congealed divinity.

As the ice cream began to melt, I smeared an extra helping across my face,
letting it dribble all over my shirt, practically bathing in that sweet, sweet
goodness. Oh yes, glorious sugary-milk, share with me your secrets, for today
I will know greatness.
…then my mom walked in. And all hell broke loose — including but not limited
to a much-needed bath. I learned a lesson that day too. Stealing ice cream
and then dumping it all over yourself and the kitchen floor makes your mother
extremely angry. And angry mothers suck. They are not pleasant to be
around. They scold you and punish you. And that day, much like the day with
the stove, I learned what not to do.

But there was a third, meta-lesson going on here as well. It was a simple
lesson — a lesson so obvious that we don’t even notice when it happens. But
this lesson was actually far more important than the other lessons: eating ice
cream is better than being burned.

That might not strike you as profound. But it is. That’s because it’s a value
judgment. Ice cream is better than hot stoves. I prefer sugary sweetness in
my mouth than a bit of fire on my hand. It’s a discovery of preference and,
therefore, prioritization. It’s the knowledge that one thing in the world is
preferable to the other and, therefore, all future behaviors will consider that
fact.

And this is the job of drooly little four-year-olds. To explore ceaselessly. To

discover the world around them — to determine what feels good and
what feels bad — and then create value hierarchies out of this knowledge. Ice
cream is better than being burned. Playing with the dog is more fun than
playing with a rock. Sunny days are better than rainy days. Coloring is more
fun to me than singing. These feelings of pleasure and pain become the
bedrock of all our preferences and knowledge going forward in life and
actually lay the foundation for what will become our identity later.